Does anyone understand where this perspective originated and the reasons for it?
It,s my understanding that in the FOSS world software is free to live and remain maintained for as long as someone is willing to use and maintain it.
Personally, I am very happy with X, and while I have no experience with Wayland, it sounds like it will be a long time before even basic functionality I need is usable. I don,t expect older hardware to be supported either.
It honestly feels like a threat or an attack on my computing world, and I want to understand it better.
But Wayland is created by people who maintained and developed X.
Since they have stopped developing X, that means it'll eventually become abandonware, in favor of Wayland.
On a different note, I don't understand what the fuss is all about. X is in a very good shape. If Wayland is not there for you yet, keep using X, until Wayland gets there.
> ## Is wayland replacing the X server?
> Mostly, yes. User sessions are able to run under Wayland today, via a number of compositors: Weston itself as well as Enlightenment, GNOME Shell, KDE, and a number of others under development. With most toolkits having Wayland ports, as well as frameworks such as GStreamer and SDL, it's perfectly possible to run a purely native Wayland session as your desktop.
> That being said, there are some clients which rely on X11, and always will be. To that end, XWayland provides a plugin for Wayland compositors, running a real X server. This gives legacy clients a real and compliant X11 platform to run on, displayed side by side with native Wayland clients in your Wayland session.
> ## Why not extend the X server?
> Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that. It's entirely possible to incorporate the buffer exchange and update models that Wayland is built on into X. However, we have an option here of pushing X out of the hotpath between clients and the hardware and making it a compatibility option. What's different now is that a lot of infrastructure has moved from the X server into the kernel (memory management, command scheduling, mode setting) or libraries (cairo, pixman, freetype, fontconfig, pango, etc) and there is very little left that has to happen in a central server process.
> ## What is wrong with X?
> The problem with X is that... it's X. When you're an X server there's a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this. For example, core fonts; this is the original font model that was how your got text on the screen for the many first years of X11. This includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs (seriously, XLFDs!). Also, the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives. For many things we've been able to keep the X.org server modern by adding extensions such as XRandR, XRender and COMPOSITE and to some extent phase out less useful extensions. But we can't ever get rid of the core rendering API and much other complexity that is rarely used in a modern desktop. With Wayland we can move the X server and all its legacy technology to an optional code path.
X works as you said for many use cases but also has some limitations for other modern use cases. I guess the Wayland folks want to bring parity with other modern desktop systems such as OSX and Windows. None of this is going to be a reality unless there are folks contributing and hacking on the system. The Wayland folks are trying to get mindshare so that the hackers feel they are working on something significant and worthwhile - as opposed to just fixing some X bugs. As much as users just want to just get bug free software, hackers like to design and reinvent the wheel so they have something to cherish - especially when no one is paying for their work. Just my .02.
When literally everyone (again excepting Keith Packard) who knows anything about graphics on Linux is telling you that X is a lost cause, with unfixable security holes and a buggy graphics model no one uses anymore, and that Wayland is the future of graphical display on Linux, maybe you should consider listening.